Pull the Thread and Unravel Me: Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield

Katie Crutchfield sings with an emotional specificity that makes it sound like she’s shining a light on her most crippling anxieties. But that vulnerability is just one side of her story; the rest isn’t even a little frail.

Not so long ago, a teenage boy tried to kiss Katie Crutchfield in the middle of a Waxahatchee show. The fan was dancing wildly, making other members of the audience uncomfortable, and then he shouted at the stage: “You’re soooo hot.” Crutchfield could not allow this. She bent down to speak to him one-on-one, but he cluelessly got way too close to her face, assuming something else was happening.

“No, I'm not trying to kiss you—no one is ever trying to kiss someone in this situation,” she recalls telling him, laughing now, many months later. “You need to calm down. You don't need to yell things at me. And you need to stop dancing all over everybody right now.”

The guy bolted toward the exit.

“The thing about white cisgendered men is that they don't want to listen to me,” Crutchfield says. “But I'm learning the best ways to approach situations like that with the most sustainable result. I want to yell at this kid over the mic, but if I do he’s not going to take anything away from it except for ‘Waxahatchee is an evil bitch.’ And that's going to be on the Internet tomorrow, which is fine—I don't care if people call me an evil bitch. But I want the kid to walk away and be like, ‘That made her and all these people feel bad, and I shouldn't do that.’”

This is peak Katie: strong but kind, hyper-aware of the Internet, and more emotionally intelligent than any 26-year-old has any right to be.

In feminist punk circles, a no-tolerance policy toward these sorts of exchanges is the norm. But Crutchfield understands that, in the real world, clashes can exist in a gray space, and their solutions require empathy. Both in her musical style and her growing fanbase, she straddles the line between DIY punk and more commercial indie rock. And she’s continuing to figure out how to handle sexism in a way that, instead of creating silos, promotes understanding.

“Waxahatchee having more visibility is exciting, because I'm not one to shy away from talking about things,” she says as we pick at croissants and berries from opposite sides of my kitchen table. “When I see something fucked-up happening, I will always say something. That's the only way that you can be, because [fame] is like a soapbox, and people should use it for good.”

With her subtle Alabama lilt, it would be easy to call Katie Crutchfield “sweet” by default. But she really is. When she turns up at my Brooklyn apartment one February afternoon, she hands me a large coffee and apologizes for not knowing how I take it. (A half hour earlier, she had asked if she should bring anything over. I said no. She texted back a row of crystal-ball emojis.) In the weeks that follow, I learn that Crutchfield is just this kind of person—the kind who makes an effort. She finds photoshoots exasperating at times, but she will still climb out onto a rusty fire escape in single-digit temperatures wearing little more than a vintage trench coat, a lace t-shirt, and slacks when a photographer asks her to.

When I hear her give friendly advice to a peer—Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves—later that day, I start to get the sense that she’s like the mom of her social circle, which is largely comprised of bands from her adopted home of Philadelphia and its thriving DIY scene; she stays silent for a long time, then offers up practical strategies.

For those who’ve spent any amount of time listening to Crutchfield’s music, it can be a struggle to remember that you do not actually know her. Over the course of three Waxahatchee albums, along with two LPs and two EPs from her old pop-punk band P.S. Eliot and a handful of teenage recordings as the Ackleys (alongside twin sister Allison, currently of the band Swearin’), Crutchfield has spent a decade setting diary entries to punkish melodies. She speaks with the kind of emotional and situational specificity that it makes it difficult not to think she’s spilling her own secrets and shining a light on her most crippling anxieties at all times.

To see your own flawed experiences reflected back in Waxahatchee songs is to mend, like a bone ultimately strengthened by a break. So it’s heartening to find out that, in many ways, Crutchfield’s creative life mirrors this juxtaposition of strength and weakness. That insecure, vulnerable person on record is just one side; the other half, which will be as important to her musical career in the long run, isn’t even a little frail. As Sam Cook-Parrott, Crutchfield’s former bandmate and current leader of Philadelphia band Radiator Hospital, puts it: “She is next level, dude—a strong and determined woman who knows what she wants. It's her world and we are just living in it.”

Gradually, in certain circles, this has come to be true. Starting with the 2012 release of American Weekend, each Waxahatchee album has bolstered Crutchfield’s notoriety, but never to a point where she saw the need to make drastic changes in how she operates: managing herself, recording at home, working with friends. “I've always been the person that does everything in the band,” she says, adjusting the messy ponytail that sits at the highest point on her head. “I just don't think I can not be that person. I've been making music for a long time and I want to keep slow burning and finding my people—and not get chewed up and spit out by the music industry in 10 years.”

Crutchfield’s catalog of confessions have reached a much wider audience than she ever intended, particularly after her last album, 2013’s Cerulean Salt, ended up on nearly every major music publication’s year-end list. Her new one, Ivy Tripp, sees her transitioning from New Jersey DIY imprint Don Giovanni to storied indie giant Merge—home to Arcade Fire, Caribou, and Ex Hex, to name a few—a move that she says stems from her new label’s artist-run outlook.

“I could relate to Mac [McCaughan] and Laura [Ballance]’s story,” Crutchfield says, talking about the North Carolina-based Superchunk mainstays who co-founded Merge. “They're from the South and they always did everything super DIY. It reminded me of my own experience, except that I had the Internet—that was my advantage.”

The self-actualizing respect runs both ways. “Katie is capable of looking at things from the standpoint of, ‘How do I make this happen?’ instead of just saying, ‘I want to do this,’” says McCaughan. “A lot of what goes into whether we work with someone is based on them having a similar outlook on the music business.”

For a year and a half, Crutchfield rented a small suburban home in Holbrook, Long Island to record what would become Ivy Tripp alongside her producer, bandmate, and then-boyfriend Keith Spencer. The two were together through the album’s recording, but when the non-musical parts of their relationship “started feeling shaky,” they decided to break up. “It seemed like the right thing to do so that we could keep making music together,” says Crutchfield. “At this point, I don't think I could really do this without him.” (Though she later mentions that her next album will likely mark a return to American Weekend­-style solo songs.)

For all the positive developments in Crutchfield’s career throughout the last two years, there have been obstacles—the biggest of which has been playing for people who don’t embrace her music’s intimacy, or perhaps don’t totally get what she’s trying to do. Waxahatchee was on the road for six months at a time following Cerulean Salt’s release, playing rock clubs where people would “woo!” as Crutchfield sang about dying loved ones. Fistfights broke out among fans who craved a quiet experience with these intense songs, and those who were there to party. “The shows started to suffer because I felt tired and overexposed,” she says.

When I see Crutchfield down at SXSW in March, I’m reminded of her rock-club horror stories. After a Thursday afternoon set in which she and her new touring band (including Allison) transformed the poppiest Ivy Tripp tracks into ripping grunge songs—albeit for an audience that seemed more interested in headliners Migos—Crutchfield tells me that just before she started playing, a guy in the crowd commented on the unshaved armpits visible from her sleeveless sundress. She’s not incensed by this, just a little stunned and annoyed. After all, she’s has seen variations of this kind of behavior before. At least he didn’t try to kiss her.

Still, there have been breaking points, like when the sexist attitudes in the Crutchfield sisters’ Birmingham, Alabama scene led them to leave the South for good in early 2011. Around that time, after playing house shows in Brooklyn, Katie and Allison would go back home, survey their own scene, and say to themselves, “These people think they’re relatively progressive [about gender politics], and they’re not.”

For the last four years, Crutchfield has ping-ponged between Brooklyn, Long Island, and Philadelphia, but she still has a certain fondness for Birmingham, where her introduction to the music world came via the now-defunct DIY space Cave9. “If I had never left there, my life would be kind of depressing,” she says. “But sometimes I think I might buy a house in Birmingham if Waxahatchee becomes the next Arcade Fire—but neither of those things is going to happen.”

Birmingham has been on her mind lately, however—specifically, the tension of a “normal” existence that’s prevalent where she comes from, versus her own alternative way of life on the East Coast. These concerns are at the heart of Ivy Tripp. While making the album, Crutchfield found herself going through a heavy spell of depression, dogged by existential, quarter-life-crisis anxieties that threatened to devour her brain whole. On one hand, there’s the kind of life trajectory that is not so much suggested as it is expected of children from traditional family units: marriage, house, baby, in a certain order, in a certain timeframe. And then there’s the life of a troubadour: traveling, meeting new people, making art, and, as Crutchfield puts it, “being 30 years old and living with 10 other people.”

“I feel like both of those parties don't understand each other, and neither of them is necessarily happier than the other,” she says. “And yet those two groups of people feel like they're living the way life is supposed to be lived.”

Katie’s own parents—an insurance agent who listens to classic country and a homemaker with a great voice and an athletic streak—likely envisioned more conventional lives for their daughters: pledging sororities, graduating college, and being married by 25. “They were just like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” Crutchfield says of her parents' reaction to her initial punk phase, chuckling now. “They hated it at first.”

The Crutchfield twins were born January 4, 1989, in Birmingham, and from very early on, the sisters took dance classes including ballet and tap. By their early teens, though, Katie and Allison were more interested in listening to the Ramones and Bikini Kill, dyeing their hair weird colors, and most importantly, playing their own music. Eventually their parents came around, but there were concerns about how Katie spent her time during a short-lived stint at University of Alabama at Birmingham as an English major, where she mapped-out tours instead of going to class. “They were like, ‘You're flunking out of college. You're such a mess!’” she recalls. “But I thought I was being so productive and doing something that I really cared about.”

“When I see something fucked-up happening, I will always say something. That's the only way that you can be, because [fame] is like a soapbox, and people should use it for good.”

Crutchfield’s goal with Ivy Tripp, her most sonically diverse album yet, is not to tie up any loose ends. “Sadness is probably the only thing that's going to be consistent in every record I make,” she says, though she worries that her wide-ranging musical interests don’t come across amidst a barrage of comparisons to female artists from the ‘90s like Liz Phair. "Don't put me in a box,” she says, with a twinge of defiance. “You don't know what I can do.” Early in the writing process for the new album, Crutchfield was inspired by ‘80s lo-fi pioneers Tall Dwarfs, whose junk store approach to power-pop can be heard in several songs. And by the time recording had ended, the influence of folk musicians like Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens also found its way into Crutchfield’s drum-machine and keyboard ballads.

Still, it’s the album’s aggressive, feedback-heavy tracks that say the most, even when it’s between the lines. One such song, titled simply “<”, repeats the double-edged phrase, “You’re less than me/ I am nothing” atop clunky percussion and a guitar line that fails to find a groove, both sideways on purpose. Like Crutchfield’s best writing, “<” reclaims the power of vulnerability. From a very early age, she knew the sting of being the kind of writer whose emotional honesty can be dismissed as oversharing, and subsequently twisted into a punchline by “boys who would be put-off, or feel insecure or threatened—the way they would deal with their own hang-ups would be to make a joke out of you.”

“Though I'm at a more confident place now, I feel like I still experience insecurities in different ways,” she says. “And the Internet makes it worse because everyone can be anonymous.” Like most cultural oversharers who find fanbases online, Crutchfield’s warts-and-all approach to personal narrative can be divisive. The Guardianonce deemed her “Lena Dunham with a guitar,” and though the comparison is more than a bit reductive, the dismissal of confessional writing from young women—be it on a much-discussed album, a well-watched TV show, or a memoir published before the age of 30—continues to take place, one subtweet at a time. “There is a real post-great-recession need for people to just be real as fuck,” Cook-Parrott counters. “We are wounded and we demand honesty from our artists, and I really think Katie has been a huge part of this thing that is inspiring young people to be open not just in their music, but just in their lives too.”

For all the success Crutchfield has had in recent years, she’s also prepared for it all to go away while settling in for the long haul. The sense of neurosis that helps drive Waxahatchee’s lyrical introspection peeks through as she speaks of worst-case scenarios, but she also knows that her creative process—recording at home, playing with loved ones—is wholly sustainable. There’s even a certain appeal to it: To see Waxahatchee play on a bill with Philly bands like Swearin’, Radiator Hospital, Girlpool, or Pinkwash is to be initiated into their scene—even their friend group—for a night.

“I’ve made music for no money forever,” she says with confidence. “I still go to punk shows all the time. Those are my people. If I walk away from this or something doesn't work out, I can just go back to doing that. Even with the wide net that I've cast, if those [new fans] don't get it anymore, then that's fine. Someone will.”